You're a Genius All the Time

It's Jack Kerouac's birthday today.

One of the best parts of my day was getting this message from my old friend Karl, so moving to me that I must post it here on my little virtual scrapbook, for mine eyes, and anyone else who cares to see. Plus, wanna get the book. From Karl: Some of my favorites from Kerouac's 30 Essentials in Belief & Technique in Modern Prose:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
5. Something that you feel will find its own form...
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language &knowledge
29. You're a Genius all the time



Now the Full Version:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
4. Be in love with yr wife
5. Something that your feel will find its own form
6. Be crazy dumbsaint of the mind
7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
8. Write what you want bottomless from the bottom of the mind
9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
16. The jewel center of interest is the eye within the eye
17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the hold contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr monrning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
27. In Praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazzier the better
29. You're a Genius all the time
30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored Angeled in Heaven
as ever,
Jack
[By Jack Kerouac, exerpted precisely as published [sic] from a letter to Don Allen 1958]

So now, I can't get that great 10,000 Maniacs song out of my head, a song a discovered about the same time I read On the Road. Favorite line? "Hey Jack, now for the tricky part/When you were the brightest star/Who were the shadows?/Of the San Francisco beat boys you were the favorite/Now they sit and rattle their bones/And think of their bloodstone days..."



You went away without saying goodbye.